At the end of this month on 29 February, the so-called “father” of the 15-minute city, Carlos Moreno, is giving a talk in Oxford, the English city pioneering a new approach to urban life.
Oxford has been the centre of controversy since November 2022 when the county council approved an experimental traffic scheme to address congestion. In autumn 2024, six traffic filters will divide the centre into 15-minute zones, with drivers allocated 100 permits a year to enter them. The zones will be monitored by Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras and any journeys taken without permits will result in fines.
Announcing the scheme before it was approved, Duncan Enright, the then cabinet member for travel, told The Sunday Times that the scheme would turn Oxford into a 15-minute city: “It is about making sure you have the community centre which has all of those essential needs, the bottle of milk, pharmacy, GP, schools, which you need to have a 15-minute neighbourhood,” he said.
No mention of getting to church, not entirely surprisingly. As this Catholic writer puts it: “Does anyone really still trust the powers-that-be, those with enough heft on the levers of power to reconfigure entire cities, to have our best interests at heart?”
The idea of the 15-minute-city goes back to 2015 when Moreno coined the term at COP21. Moreno, a professor at the Sorbonne, brought together a raft of urban planning concepts under a new buzzword and the promotable idea that everything the average city-dweller needed should be available within a short walk or bike ride.
A few years later, organisations such as the World Economic Forum argued that Covid had given the idea a new urgency, with Moreno claiming in a Ted talk of 2021 that post-pandemic cities were far more receptive to “human-sized space”.
Before going further, I should declare an interest. Oxford is my alma mater, the university which gave me my bicycle calves as I cycled between tutorials, parties and bed. The university gave me a good education in a casual kind of way, engendering enough academic interest to do two postgraduate degrees elsewhere, followed by a stint teaching philosophy and critical thinking. In Britain, we do critical thinking well. Or so I thought.
So imagine my surprise when, decades later from my expat perch in Portugal – somewhat forced by escaping lockdown Britain (and taking much longer than 15 minutes) – I watched the debate around 15-minute cities unfold in the most bizarre way.
Advocates of the Oxford scheme argued it was going to transform the city into self-sufficient neighbourhoods. I looked at the proposals again. Did they include plans for any new amenities? Did they involve assessments of what was already available? No. Just cameras, permits and fines.
It turned out that advocates were arguing for one thing (traffic restrictions) on the basis of another (the desirability of more local facilities). If that was sales talk, it was not of the reputable kind.
This slippery non-sequitur was used as the basis for repelling objections. In articles and on social media, those questioning the scheme received rebukes along the likes of: Don’t you want to live in a lovely local neighbourhood with lots of trees, local markets and public services? What is wrong with you?
Such posts were sometimes accompanied by halcyon pictures portraying stick people walking and cycling between pastel-coloured houses. My resulting cognitive dissonance was exacerbated by my knowledge of local government. Thanks to a former career as a public policy journalist, I was acutely aware that the Oxford scheme exemplified a shift in the attitudes of local authorities. Until recently, councils used their limited funds and powers to facilitate modest steps towards “localism”, perhaps by seed-funding a community project.
But suddenly they were seeking an unprecedented level of control over public space and the daily lives of residents. It seemed odd that British society was not allowing itself the space to debate the implications. This made the labelling of critics as “conspiracy theorists” all the more concerning. The mainstream media, staffed by well-educated sorts, led the charge: “What are 15-minute cities and why are anti-vaxxers so angry about them?” ran a headline in The Times last year.
The Guardian mocked “the online right” for being frightened “of greener, people-friendly streets”. A Forbes article identified 15-minute city critics as part of a dangerous demographic: “In an all too typical Venn diagram of tinfoilhattedness…they share climate denial, downplay of Covid harms and anti-vaxxer beliefs.”
In the Forbes article, Moreno himself took the condemnation of so-called conspiracy theorists’ to new emotive levels: ‘“Their lies are enormous…[suggesting] you will be locked in your neighbourhood; cameras will signal who can go out; if your mother lives in another neighbourhood, you will have to ask for permission to see her and so on.”’
From the education that began at Oxford, I recognised these arguments as a mixture of straw man (attributing to the other party a position they don’t hold) and ad hominem (personal insults) tactics. Their resemblance to personal disputes in which one party hurls accusations at the other was also striking. In such cases, the accusations often throw the accused off-balance and distract them from the substantive issue. Transferred to the public domain, this tactic stifles any real debate.
And so it is with the driving restrictions justified by the mirage of the 15-minute city. While you may not be actually banned from visiting your mother in Oxford, depending on the distances involved and your ability to cycle, visiting her could certainly become increasingly difficult [editor’s note: on the Catholic Herald pilgrimage to Fatima, one of our pilgrims, who lived in Oxford, described with much vexation encountering exactly this challenge in reaching her elderly mother – who used to be very easy to visit: by car – following the introduction of a Low Traffic Neighbourhood (LTN) precursor to the proposed scheme].
Amid the accusations and name-calling, no reasonable discussion seems possible. The myriad reasons for local journeys by car – time-pressed parents juggling work with school runs, musicians transporting kit to gigs, salt-of-the-earth types ferrying things to community events, taking flowers to the local church (tricky on the back of a bike, as with most cases of transporting fragile and larger collections of items) – are all dismissed before they even have a chance to be considered.
So perhaps, given the radicality of the new measures, the bizarre reasoning and the stifling of debate, it’s no wonder that more and more people are questioning councils’ enthusiasm for the 15-minute city.
Open, reasonable public discussion is essential to a functioning democracy. I hope that the talk Moreno gives in Oxford will contribute to that, rather than repeat the stifling sins of the recent past.
Alex Klaushofer is an author and journalist. She writes about the changing times on Substack at Ways of Seeing.
Photo: A man walks along a narrow city centre road in Oxford, England, 3 August 2023. Oxford’s city council proposed urban plan for “15-minute” neighbourhoods, supposedly inspired by “successful models” in other European cities like Groningen and Leuven, purports to improve residents’ quality of life by providing essential services within a short walking or biking distance. It has sparked controversy, also, due to concerns about restrictions on motorists and its potential impact on personal freedoms. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images.)
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